About this weblog

Here we'll explore the nexus of legal rulings, Capitol Hill
policy-making, technical standards development, and technological
innovation that creates -- and will recreate -- the networked world as we
know it. Among the topics we'll touch on: intellectual property
conflicts, technical architecture and innovation, the evolution of
copyright, private vs. public interests in Net policy-making, lobbying
and the law, and more.

Disclaimer: the opinions expressed in this weblog are those of the authors and not of their respective institutions.

On the surface, what's at stake here is the future of the BitTorrent search engine, which was previewed back in May of this year. The agreement by BitTorrent (the company) is to obey the existing law (DMCA) with regard to takedown notices for content deemed illegal that shows up on their search engine. For the most part, this is a no-op. The company more or less had to do this to stay a legal enterprise, and is putting a good face on the inevitable. Presumably, few people trading, say, first-run movies are going to be stupid enough to put their torrent sites into the index of the search engine anyway. So in the end, unless Hollywood somehow figures out a way to put the protocol genie back into the bottle this is going to have just about zero impact on the trading of content via BitTorrent (the protocol).

Looking a layer deeper, this story is about whether or not the Cartel will allow companies that kowtow sufficiently to go legit, especially after showing they can smash Grokster (the company - no effect on music trading of course). As with any protocol, BitTorrent software can be used for any number of purposes. If the Cartel ever want to have a distribution protocol and network for their content they'll have to buy or build something. if BitTorrent (the company) wants to be part of that buy/build answer - and I bet it does - then this kind of agreement is absolutely necessary table stakes.